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Few studies have been conducted to assess agricultural sustainability in the European Union (EU), and all of them fail to provide a holistic view of sustainability in a relevant temporal horizon that could effectively support the design of policies. In this paper, a composite indicator is constructed based on the geometric aggregation of 12 basic indicators measured yearly in the period 2004–2020 (17 years) on all EU countries plus United Kingdom, with weights determined endogenously according to the Benefit of Doubt (BoD) approach. Our composite indicator has a two-level hierarchical structure accounting for the contributions of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. In our results, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania and Poland are the countries with the strongest growth rate of sustainability, while countries reaching the 90th percentile of the score in sustainability include Austria, Czechia, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Sweden. In overall, the social and the environmental dimensions have similar levels, while the level of the economic dimension is definitely higher. Interestingly, several countries with a high level of sustainability are characterized by a decline of the economic dimension, including Austria, Finland, Italy, Latvia and Slovakia. The reliability of our composite indicator is supported by the substantial agreement of sustainability scores with subsidies attributed by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Therefore, our proposal represents a valuable resource not only to monitor the progress of EU member countries towards sustainability objectives, but also to refine the scheme for the attribution of CAP subsidies in order to stimulate specific sustainable dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stakeholders decisions often are based on the construction of an indicative quantity (a composite indicator), which can be obtained by an aggregation process of a series of single indicators. This aggregation process combines single indicators to one quantity, the composite indicator. In the most simple aggregation technique a weighted sum is applied. Unfortunately, stakeholders often have different opinions concerning the individual weights that should be associated with single indicators. The resulting composite indicator applied for an eventual ranking may consequently be different from stakeholder to stakeholder. The present study focuses on a partial order based methodology for evaluating stakeholders' opinions based on the food sustainability index for 2017 as an exemplary case. The paper presents the methodological background for the use of composite indicators under different weighting schemes. The food sustainability index (FSI) is composed through an aggregation of three main indicators, i.e., food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture and nutritional challenges. In the present case four fictitious 'stakeholders', represented by four different weighting schemes, expert-based, political, outcome-based and uniform are included. The study shows that differences between the four weighting schemes are present. Furthermore it is shown that within certain limits the overall ranking of 34 countries based on the FSI leads to a linear ranking of 4 specific groups of countries, virtually summarizing the different stakeholders' opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]